Virtually all of the new P4 P4F800 boards using the ICH5R southbridge support RAID 0 and 1 and support SATA drives. With the current ATA & SATA drives and their supporting controllers there shouldn't be a reason for SCSI in DV editing. In uncompressed editing, you will need hardware capable of sustaining the underlying data rate.

Thanks, but I was referring to the ability that you could setup your ATA drives into a raid configuration. I am not talking about the real SCSI drives. That would be too expensive.

Nigel, I just like the option of the onboard raid. If I really really need it, I know it's there. As for overclocking. I meantioned that it wasn't my thing but I wanted to know how it would effect the performance in an editing setup. That's all. Thanks for all your import guys.

Hi Charles.

My 2 cents in trying to help you on your decision:

Unless you have rather a big budget ( meaning a lot of money to spend), you will have to make some compromises and manage carefuly the resouces (money) you have, in order to get as much equipment as you can. So, here are some tips:

No overclocking - The possible gain you could get does not pay for the troubles you can get.

No double processor machines and plenty Gigs of Ram - Save the money for other equipment.

Before you decide wich motherboard to buy, choose the video editing card. Then go to their site and see what motherboards they have tested with their cards.

Get a dual display video card and two 19" monitors. Matrox G550 is cheap and will do the job.

Get a good video Monitor - Video seen in computer monitors is crap.

With today's disk drives, RAID is of lesser importance for video editing.

Buy a DVD recorder.

Get at least 3 disk drives - One for your operating system, another for your audio and video files and another for exports.

Get an UPS.

Get a trackball.

If you can, buy a video editing board with real time capabilities (i.e. Matrox RT-X100 Xtreme) - You will be less dependant on your pc performance.

Well, just a few thoughts...

Need any more help --> feel free to ask.

Best regards
Arnaldo

Thanks Arnaldo for summing things up. On regards to getting an editing card. I will be going software(due to a budget) As I mentioned in my other post, Avid DV Xpress and bPremiere Pro when it comes out. Again, I am not into overclocking and not interested in doing so. I just wanted to know for curiosity sake, what the difference was.
BTW, I already have the G550 card and two 19" monitors.

You'r welcome.

If you ever get enough money, buy the Matrox RT-X100. You will get Adobe Premiere and Reel DVD (the program you will want to have if you ever go into DVD recording) for free and, like I said, real time encoding wich makes all the diference.

Best regards
Arnaldo

http://www.bestbyte.net/Category.cfm?CategoryID=6&Keyword=#18

it's the blue or gold heat spreaders. ramsink is for video card and smaller memory. for regular sticks of RAM you can use a clip that attaches heat spreaders to RAMs. it does help. you can see on a RAM here:

http://www.techaddicts.net/corsair3200/Corsair1.html

<<<-- Originally posted by Charles King : Sorry for being dumb but what is a ram sink clip? -->>>

r u kiddin me? dual proc machines were MADE for dv editing and heavy workloads of the like. in fact imho it's minimum requirement.

<<<-- Originally posted by Arnaldo Paixao : Hi Charles.
No double processor machines and plenty Gigs of Ram - Save the money for other equipment.
-->>>


as for abit vs asus, i'd go with abit. they're both taiwanese co but i believe abit is a better board. asus is th largest brand name mobo mfr on the planet but because of that it's too large to handle qc/customer service. ya know the large co syndrome.

I find that Asus gives responses (from Shanghai) within 48 hours and the responses have been accurate. Can't comment on Abit.

Note that if you are not overclocking (which usually implies increased voltages) you should have any problem with any of them. And your won't need head spreaders for memory that doesn't come with the chips.

That said, I think a quiet PC is important for video production. Boards targeted for the most performance have their emphasis on cooling (because of the over clocking and over volting) not sound. AOpen and Asus have boards that focus on sound. (AOpen even used to make boards with vacuum tubes in its audio circuits.)

I don't know but if you run dual processors, the software has to be written to take advantage of that. Do these editing programs do that? A program cannot run on dual procs if it's not designed to take advantage of it.

I've heard some people say Asus never replied and others say they get a resonse with 48 hours. I've never had to call them cause I've never had a bad board. If you want to overclock, Asus boards are very flexible.

All this stuff about memory clips and other heat reducing is fine if you are overclocking. But if you are running the board as designed, these tricks are a waste of money. Just because your memory can respond slightly faster won't make the processor faster.

This confusion over which board to buy is one of the reasons why it's good to stick with one or two favorites. The differences are virtually unnoticeable, as far as speed, and you tear your hair out over minute features you will never use. I stick with Asus because the people who test these things always highly rate them and their installation manuals are well written.

Don't have a cow about power supplies either. Sure, there are bad ones out there but chances are the one you buy will be fine. All my systems (4) run with supplies I got for less than $20. None crash or otherwise act screwy. (All are P4s at 1.7 Ghz and up). One failed two days after I bought it but the vendor replaced it and it's been running for 6 months.

I don't feel comfortable with generic brand stuff but I'll use it. The idea is reliability of components and does it work. If a vendor is selling a memory stick for your computer, it better match the timing for that type of memory or they'll have returns out the butt. It doesn't matter who makes it. When I designed medical computers we would sometimes go to Radio Shack if we needed something quick.

I'm running Premiere 6.5 and in it's startup, it displays that it recognizes dual processors on my 875 chipset board running a 3.0 Intel Hyperthreading processor. I'm guessing that means it takes advantage of the capability?

It means that it recognises a second (virtual) CPU, not necessarily that it's taking advantage of it. HT is different to SMP and programmes have to be written with this in mind.

FWIW, Premiere Pro is both HT and SMP aware.

the majority of content creation programs are smp aware. nearly all 3D apps do (like 3ds max 5.x, maya 5.x, etc.) and photoshop, premiere, after fx, etc. can't be too sure on macromedia but they should be too.

Premiere and AE are only SMP in the new, yet to be released, versions. The current versions are not AFAIK.

Hi Yi Fong Yu.

I understand your reaction, but please take into consideration this:

In my first post I said "Unless you have rather a big budget ( meaning a lot of money to spend), you will have to make some compromises and manage carefuly the resouces (money) you have, in order to get as much equipment as you can.". Of course if one can, a dual processor machine with plenty of RAM, SCSI 320 RAID and 15000 rpm disks is the best to have, but that costs a lot of money.

When you say dual processor machines is minimum requirement for video editing, I have to desagree with you. My experience and i.e. the Matrox site say that you don't need that. You can take advantage of that processing power if you do complex video editing wich is not the case with Charles (he is begining). With the price difference between a dual machine and a single machine, one can buy a video editing card with real time complex transitions, effects and MPEG-2 encoding included.

Best rgards
Arnaldo

re: smp for adobe stuff:

i don't think ps4.x does but since 5.5 and later it has been smp aware. when i ran premiere 5.0 it was dual capable. i dunno abuot AE 5.0 but 5.5 prod bundle right now is dual capable.

so ps after 5.5, prem after 5.0, AE after 5.5 =). you know how when it renders it shows you the colors well for smp it won't show you the color pie chart =). it's disabled for some weird reason.

i just hope that the new prem written from the ground up will be groundbreaking. 5.5 and lower sucked in terms of editing. it was simply too slow even on smp vs other dv apps. even pinnacle 8.x beats it.

re: cost of smp.

again, it depends on what you are doing. if you're checking email,etc. single proc is fine. if you are into content creation, not just dv editing but even web, 3D, etc. it's really the industry standard to do it on dual cpu. by choosing single proc you're paying only about 70-80% of a smp system. a good smp system nowadays doesn't REQUIRE scsi, it's preferable but scsi is what kills the price of the 'workstation'. WD just came w/SATA, 10k rpm hd named, "raptor" though only 40gb or so it's REALLY good. i have it (non RAID) but it's best bang/buck.